Adobe Primetime is an important system for over-the-air or cable broadcasters looking to bring their content online and generate ad revenue. At the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London, Steve Allison, an Adobe technical evangelist, spoke about returning consistency to the fractured world of online video.

"At the moment, advertising is not a particularly good experience, so we'll talk about how we can improve that," Allison said. "Now in the olden days, this was quite easy. If you wanted to do great video, all different kinds of platforms, you just had to do Flash and you'd reach everywhere. Things have changed slightly. The point about Flash was consistency. Getting the same capabilities across all of those different devices. There are now emerging other ways of doing that."

While HTML5 might be the future of online video, it's not yet the present. Serving to all viewers currently requires a mix of platforms.

"HTML5 is not ready for primetime video, for high-quality video if video's your business, because it doesn't have any controls around it, any of the controls over delivery or protection or anything like that," Allison explained. "But, as a UI framework, actually it's a very rich thing. People now are starting to build HTML5 player environments that can then call proper video technologies underneath that. We've actually put a lot of the Flash technology into HTML5.

To hear more about monetizing video with Adobe Primetime, watch the video below:

Designed to offer seamless delivery of both live video streams and video ads via apps and browsers to multiple devices, Adobe's Project Primetime was recently chosen by the BBC to power its online delivery of the 2012 London Olympics. This session looks behind the scenes at how Project Primetime works to enable monetisation of live video content.